La Cienega Area

James David Thomas cannot seem to decide if he is a landscape painter or a constructivist, so he welds these dubious bedfellows into multipaneled works, each composed of a few stark geometric canvases set against a few landscape vistas. The hybrid is remotely effective. Thomas distills and condenses landscapes to look like opaque abstract arrangements. We can still read stars in a night sky in one speckled midnight blue panel, or a crimson sunset over rolling desert hills in another, but the veracity of the scene is attenuated just enough to help the great outdoors live comfortably beside squares of matte orange, rectangles of gilt and long lateral bands of bright green. Thomas arranges the numerous panels into interesting architectonic-shaped canvases that gain presence as you step away from them, but the whole format is too resolutely commercial and does neither geometry nor landscape justice. (Hunsaker Schlesinger, 812 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 9).